Written to keep myself in trim while sick and unable to research.

On Feb. 13, 1987, I learned that life has a purpose. And I was shown what that purpose was.

I was shown it wordlessly. It took ten years to find words for it and ten more years to write it up. (1)

Strangely, even though I can’t remember what I had for breakfast or even if I had breakfast, I can remember everything about that vision as if it were yesterday.

Let me give a little background necessary for understanding.

I was in a Ph.D. program in Sociology, studying small groups. To get my feet wet, I was giving voluntary counselling sessions just for experience.

I was following Jay Haley’s Problem-Solving Therapy. They’d present me with a problem and I’d present them with a solution.

But no one was buying my solutions and I kept having to come up with new ones. This was hard work.

Instead they’d look at me when I offered my solution as if I was nuts and then continue with their story.

And finally the light went on. They wanted listening. They wanted to be heard. They wanted to lay everything out on the table to see what it was they were up against.

And when they did, frequently they’d have an “Aha!” The puzzle had become a picture. Now all they wanted was to leave and tell their loved ones what they’d just discovered.

OK, that’s the background to what happened that Friday morning, Friday the Thirteenth of February, 1987.

I was driving to my place of work as a business writer at a digital imaging firm.  I rounded the corner at Park and Oak, a section of Vancouver very well known to me in my younger years.

I was musing. And it suddenly occurred to me to ask the universe, “If our early lives are a puzzle, which then becomes a picture, could it be that life itself is a puzzle and, if it is, what is the picture that life is?”

I had no real expectation of getting an answer.

But then everything went black. I found myself staring at a large Golden Sun, from out of which came a small golden star. I was drenched in bliss and that allowed me to know what I was watching, because there were no words.

I knew that the Golden Sun was what Jesus called God the Father.  The small golden star was a spark of God, an individuated soul: God the Child. It raced off into the distance.

I found I had the ability to travel to where it was. And I saw that it was in the midst of a sort of cloud, which I knew to be God the Mother, completing the Trinity. (2)

Its light had dimmed and it was travelling through a spiral tube, lifetime after lifetime. The art piece that most represents what it would look like to view things on the same plane is this one, which is why I use it so often:

The arc it follows is also a spiral because, by the law of karma, we return to the same situations until we understand the lesson they contain.  That gives the arc its spiral shape.

Suddenly the little golden star’s light flashed back on. It left the Mother’s domain and raced back to the Father and disappeared.

I looked at it all and was awestruck. Then the words formed in my mind: The purpose of life is enlightenment.

And with that I was back behind the wheel of a car.

I looked from side to side, because I knew this area well, and in the eight-odd seconds of the vision, I hadn’t moved an inch. I was outside of time.

I remained in bliss for three days. During that time I could see spiritual truths illustrated everywhere. The birds fly through the sky leaving no trace, just as the soul flies through lifetimes also leaving no trace.

The trees raise their branches to the sky as if in adoration. Their leaves drop but the tree doesn’t die; just as our bodies drop but the soul doesn’t die.

Now I understood what things were all about.

My Ph.D. studies were now insipid. I appealed to my thesis advisor to allow me to study enlightenment and he wouldn’t hear of it. So I left the groves of academe.

***

Let me give my understanding of the meaning behind the statement that the purpose of life is enlightenment.

Hindus call life a leela or divine play. It is indeed. The One wanted to meet itself, to encounter and enjoy itself. How could it do so?

The plan was to create a dream world in which beings, thinking themselves separate, would be drawn ever onwards towards Self-Knowledge.

And when one of us would realize ourselves, the Self we’d realize is God.

That would mean that God would meet God in a moment of our enlightenment.  Thus is the One able to have an experience of itself.

For that meeting was everything we see and don’t see created.

So our purpose in life is to realize ourselves.  As Rumi once put it, it doesn’t matter if we do 100 other things. If we don’t do the one thing we’re tasked with (enlightenment), we’ve done nothing at all. (3) A little dramatic but it gets the point across.

We’re drawn towards this consummation by a subtidal thirst for the Divine that only reunion can satisfy.  (4)

So the circle that the small golden star followed goes from God to God, as Jesus said:

“I came forth from the Father, and am come out into the world: again, I leave the world and go to the Father.” (5)

His saying has a few levels. One is that it describes the journey that all of us are taking, to realize ourselves so that, in the process, God can meet God.

If we want a visual representation of what it would look like to see everyone’s journey from God to God at once, the torus would be a good one.

Each being arises from God, goes out into the world, and returns to God again.

Now here’s the really hard part: Given that you are God, God’s purpose must also be your own.

Footnotes

(1) The product of it is The Purpose of Life is Enlightenment at https://goldenageofgaia.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Purpose-of-Life-is-Enlightenment.pdf

(2) Hindus would recognize this Trinity as Brahman, Atman, and Shakti.

(3)  “There is one thing in this world which must never be forgotten. If you were to forget everything else, but did not forget that, then there would be no cause for worry; whereas if you performed and remembered and did not forget every single thing, but forgot that one thing, then you would have done nothing whatsoever.

“It is just as if a king had sent you to the country to carry out a specified task. You go and perform a hundred other tasks; but if you have not performed that particular task on account of which you had gone to the country, it is as if you have performed nothing at all. So man has come into this world for a particular task, and that is his purpose; if he does not perform it, then he will have done nothing.” (Rumi in A.J. Arberry, trans., Discourses of Rumi. New York; Samuel Weiser, 1977; c1961, 26.)

(4) Shankara called it the longing for liberation:

“[The] longing for liberation is the will to be free from the fetters forged by ignorance — beginning with the ego-sense and so on, down to the physical body itself — through the realization of one’s true nature.” (Shankara in Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher lsherwood, Shankara’s Crest-Jewel of Discrimination. Hollywood: Vedanta Press, 1975; c1947, 36.)

“All things long for [God]. The intelligent and rational long for it by way of the stirrings of being alive and in whatever fashion befits their condition.” (Pseudo-Dionysius in Cohn Luibheid, trans., Pseudo-Dionysus, His Complete Works. New York and Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1989, 54.)

(5) Jesus in John 16:28.